C.S. Lewis: A 'Rowan Williams Anglican'?
Let me suggest something which might possibly provoke some push-back: C.S. Lewis was a 'Rowan Williams Anglican'.
What is meant by a 'Rowan Williams Anglican'? By this I mean a Prayer Book Catholic; standing in succession to Lux Mundi; deeply critical of the Liberal, demythologising theological project; and holding a generous vision of catholicity.
What is the evidence for Lewis being a 'Rowan Williams Anglican'?
Prayer Book Catholics together
Perhaps the figure in later 20th century Anglicanism who most embodied what it is to be a Prayer Book Catholic is Austin Farrer. He has been described as "a Prayer Book Anglican in the Tractarian tradition". Prepared to challenge the Roman tradition for its uncatholic claims, not joining with those Anglo-Catholics who opposed the Church of South India, holding together Cranmer and Dearmer in his approach to liturgy, his Prayer Book Catholicism can be identified in both Lewis and Williams. What is more, there is in Lewis and Williams a shared assessment of Farrer's theological significance. Lewis described him "one of the most learned theologians alive"; Williams has described him as "possibly the greatest Anglican mind of the 20th century".
Rupert Shortt notes that "the philosopher-theologian Farrer" was one of those figures in the Church of England for whom Williams "felt a rising urge to breathe the same air". Lewis, of course, did breathe the same air as Farrer, over decades. And it was Farrer who ministered to Joy at her death, who presided at her funeral, who ensured that Lewis received the last ministrations of the Church during his final hospitalisation, and who participated in the funeral liturgy for Lewis.
The evidence for the Prayer Book Catholicism of Lewis is well-known: his practice of prayer for the departed (mindful of the controversy it provoked in the proposed revision of 1927/28); his support for the eastward position; his use of private confession and absolution; his understanding of a sacramental quality to Confirmation (again, an issue of controversy in 1927/28) and Marriage; and his relationship with the Cowley Fathers. Alongside this, his refusal to adopt Roman Catholic practices of Marian piety or - despite his 'high' Eucharistic views - to promote Benediction further reflected Prayer Book Catholic stances.
We might note also note the characteristic Prayer Book Catholic moderation in his view of the Reformation, lamenting divisions and excesses, while recognising the need for reform. In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, he stated that the divisions of the Reformation could have been avoided if they had been "fruitfully debated", resulting in "conditions formulae might possibly have been found which did justice to the Protestant . . . assertions". In Letters to Malcolm, quoting with disapproval Fisher and More, he declared that "the Reformers had good reasons for throwing doubt on 'the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory' as that Romish doctrine had then become". He also rejected the invocation of saints: "There is clearly also a great danger. In some popular practice we see it leading off into an infinitely silly picture of heaven as an earthly court where applicants will be wise to pull the right wires, discover the best 'channels'".
In both Lewis and Williams we see those who identify with Gore's classic Prayer Book Catholic definition of Anglicanism:
It has stood for what can, I think, be best described as a liberal or scriptural Catholicism: that is to say it has stood to maintain the ancient fundamental faith of the Catholic Church, as expressed in creeds and conciliar decisions of the undivided Church, and the ancient structure of the Church, as depending upon the successions of bishops, and the requirement of episcopal ordination for the ministry, and the ministration of the ancient sacraments and rites of the Church by the methods and on the principles which it believed to be primitive. On such a basis it has claimed to stand as part of the Catholic Church; and at the same time it has associated itself with the Protestants in what it believed to be their legitimate protest and appeal against the exaggerated claim of the mediaeval papacy and the mediaeval accumulation of dogma, and their appeal to the primitive Church, and especially to Scripture, as the sole final testing-ground of dogmatic requirement.
In the tradition of Lux Mundi
When asked by correspondents for reading material on the Christian faith, Charles Gore appeared regularly in recommendations by Lewis. For example, in 1942 Lewis recommended Gore's Jesus Christ and The Philosophy of the Good Life. In a letter of 1944, he described A New Commentary on Holy Scripture, of which Gore was an editor, as "probably the best single book of modern comment on the Bible". One commentator has refers to this as a text "written by liberal Anglo-Catholic scholars with Bishop Charles Gore as its general editor, [in which] contributors tried to stay faithful to the creed while at the same time welcoming the then new biblical criticism". In 1961, he pointed to Gore's The Sermon on the Mount as a text for studying "Christian morals".
Alongside Gore, Lewis also did not hesitate in recommending the successor volume to Lux Mundi, Essays Catholic and Critical (1926). In 1940 he described it as "on the whole good" and in 1942 as "a good modern book". Related to this, Atonement and Personality by Robert Campbell Moberely, one of the contributors to Lux Mundi, was also recommended by Lewis in 1942. By contrast, we might note Lewis referring to "the Christian element in Oxford" (presumably the evangelical Christian Union) "reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth ... They don't think human reason or human conscience of any value at all".
This would suggest that Lewis saw himself standing in the tradition of Lux Mundi and Essays Catholic and Critical, the same tradition in which Williams would become a key figure.
Perfect Myth
The critique of demythologisation offered by Lewis has significant similarities with Williams' critique of contemporary liberal theology. Consider, for example, the concluding words of Lewis in his 1944 'Myth became Fact':
For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.
Now compare this with Williams' critique of Spong:
Yet I see no life in what the theses suggest; nothing to educate us into talking about the Christian God in a way I can recognise: no incarnation; no adoption into intimate relation with the Source of all; no Holy Spirit. No terror. No tears.
Similarly, we might note Williams' view that demythologising empties Christian faith and practice of meaning:
For the record: I have never quite managed to see how we can make sense of the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and I have never managed to see how to put together such a theology without belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.
This is also what Lewis identified as the threat of radical liberal theology in his "missionary" appeal to the "priests of [his] own church" - 'Fern Seed and Elephants' - suggesting that such theology will inevitably lead to a rejection of faith and practice:
If [a layperson] agrees with your version [of the faith] he will no longer himself a Christian and no longer come to church.
To return to 'Myth became Fact', Lewis declares, "Those who do not know that this great myth became fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied". Pitied indeed, for as Williams said in response to Spong:
Perhaps the underlying theme in all this is that if you don’t believe in a God totally involved in and totally different from the universe, it’s harder to see the universe as gift; harder to be open to whatever sense of utter unexpectedness about the life and death of Jesus made stories of pregnant virgins and empty tombs perfectly intelligible; harder to grasp why people thank God in respect of prayers answered and unanswered.
Generously catholic
In both Lewis and Williams we can see how a robust Christocentric vision gives rise to a generous catholicity. That Williams is equally at east speaking at a Wheaton College conference as at a Synod of Bishops in Rome is, well, very Lewis-like. Likewise, Lewis' affirmation in Mere Christianity that "We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him" is echoed in how Williams approaches other faiths:
whether all those who come to the Father by way of the Word, by way of Jesus Christ, will have known the face of Jesus – the question of God’s dealing with those of other faiths or even of none ... We can say that anyone on this road is there because of the Word, even because of what Christ historically achieves in his crucifixion and resurrection, whose effects are simply there, given, accomplished for the whole creation; but on our own unending journey into the circling motion of divine love, we may well hesitate before deciding prematurely who journeys with us.
Elephants in the room
Finally, of course, we need to address the elephants in the room: the ordination of women to the ministerial priesthood and human sexuality. It would have been (to say the very least) surprising for Lewis in the 1950s to have supported the ordination of women. Placing him alongside Eric Mascall (who also appeared in his reading recommendations) and Austin Farrer emphasises the extent to which we should be unsurprised by his opposition. When it comes to human sexuality, the picture is rather more nuanced. His opposition to the criminalisation of homosexuality and his life-long friendship with Arthur Greeves both suggest a less than conventional 1950s conservative attitude. Mindful of how many in the Prayer Book Catholic tradition came to support the ordination of women and pastoral provision for same-sex relationships, speculation about how Lewis may have later responded to these issues is not necessarily straight-forward. In addition to this, we might ask if Lewis would inevitably have regarded these issues as having greater weight and significance than the issues mentioned above in his understanding of Anglicanism.
Conclusion
In his The Lion's World: A journey into the heart of Narnia (2012), Rowan Williams says:
I can only confess to being repeatedly humbled and reconverted by Lewis in a way that is true of few other modern writers. Re-reading works I have not looked at for some time, I realize where a good many favourite themes and insights come from, and am constantly struck by the richness of imagination and penetration.
Perhaps, then, it is not so much that C.S. Lewis is a 'Rowan Williams Anglican' but that Williams is a 'C.S. Lewis Anglican'.
Lewis wanted above all to remind us that our very reality, our very life, depended on the life and reality of God. He wanted to remind us that there was no truth, no joy, no life, that did not come to us unexpectedly from beyond - Rowan Williams, sermon at the 2013 dedication of the memorial to Lewis in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey.
God is first and foremost that depth around all things and beyond all things into which, when I pray, I try to sink. But God is also the activity that comes to me out of that depth, tells me I’m loved, that opens up a future for me, that offers transformations I can’t imagine - Rowan Williams, interviewed by Melvyn Bragg, quoted in Rupert Shortt, God is No Thing.
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